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Activists welcome government’s stance on gay sex |
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 Gay activists and lawyers Thursday welcomed the government's decision to leave it to the Supreme Court to arrive at a view on decriminalising homosexuality among consenting adults, saying the stance is not "negative" or "against them."
"I feel that the government is not interfering. This is a good stand. It is not negative because it implies they don't oppose the high court recommendation," Ashok Row Kavi, a gay rights activist, told IANS.
Kavi stressed that the government had to consider views of both the majority and minority and its "decision is not going against the gay minority."
"It is a matter of constitutional morality. This will let us fight it out in court," he said.
The UNAIDS also welcomed the government's stance.
"Today the union Cabinet took a small but extremely important step in the fight against HIV and AIDS by upholding the rights of men to have sex with other men through not contesting the historic Delhi High Court ruling on 377," said a statement issued by Charles Gilks, UNAIDS Country Coordinator, India.
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Blurring the boundaries of love |
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 In the rush to 'define', have we forgotten Southasia's long history of blurring the boundaries of love, of the distinction between the platonic and the sexual? Young men wander hand in hand, giggle together, sit on each other's laps. At weddings and parties they dance together sensuously, usually without any woman around. In many places, such overt displays of physical bonding between the same sex would be immediately slotted as homosexual. Whether viewed with liberal acceptance or castigated with opprobrium, it would first be categorised. Yet in the scene sketched here, most of the young men are intensely interested in girls, not boys. In today's Kabul, whether due to the unforgiving taboos on overt displays of heterosexual behaviour, or having grown up under the Taliban regime, which managed to make women disappear from sight, intense displays of physical affection between men are the norm, even more so than in other Southasian cities and towns. Despite the extreme sexual repression that continues to exist in Afghanistan, this 'permission' to exhibit physical tenderness towards the same sex simultaneously challenges the stereotypes of homosexual, heterosexual and even bisexual identities, which often form the core of gender politics elsewhere.
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South Asia 
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